Notes From My Knapsack 6-11-20

Notes From My Knapsack 6-11-20

Jeff Gill

 

Opening up, holding back

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With the ever-loosening state "stay-at-home" orders and business restrictions for health reasons, it's easy to see the debate sorting into two polar opposites: hunker down longer, or open it up completely, now! And you can certainly find adherents of either extreme in both everyday discourse and official perspectives.

 

But on coronavirus restrictions I think a person can, and do myself have three thoughts at the same time. I don't own and operate a business, but I do have responsibilities for a faith community, and the question of "opening up" has gnawed at people like me almost every day since mid-March, for congregations as much as commercial establishments.

 

What I've never felt was the either/or angle on this. It just hasn't seemed like all or nothing, even if that's what social media and cable news can make you think.

 

There's what the state restrictions officially are, and yes, churches are exempted from most of them, but even there we have strongly urged recommendations from the officials, along with what are mandated guidelines for comparable buildings and events. So I keep that in mind.

 

Then there's what I personally think. That's complicated, and changes over time, but I have my own developing sense of what's absolutely necessary, what's helpful, and what's probably not needed . . . in my opinion. There are websites and databases I trust, and information sent me by well-meaning friends and associates which I reserve the right to view skeptically. But it's all, on a certain level, just Jeff's opinion. Which is just that, opinions and not facts, and they're part of how I adapt my own behavior, but not an iron rule for all.

 

The third is how I handle the previous two categories in light of my immediate official setting, which has its own demographics and physical limitations. What I'd do if I were in a different building layout, or with a different audience in terms of age and other factors, is beside the point. We are a particular faith community in a specific structure, and the layout is what it is.

 

Given those three intertwined lines of thinking, I can perfectly well celebrate and encourage some churches doing things quite differently than I am recommending or practicing in my own situation. Just because one faith community is open and operating and another isn't doesn't mean one has to think the other is wrong, and vice versa. I've seen and heard some recklessness that worries me, but mostly people are being cautious, and careful, and we'll all watch the data over the next few weeks and see what rises or falls.

 

And I may think later I was too cautious in this season. That's perfectly possible. But that prospect is far less worrying to me than later wishing I'd been more careful, and realizing after it was too late I'd helped harm others by my haste. It's a larger, slower moving version of the internal debate I have every time I push hard on my accelerator in the car. Rarely do I think later "drat, should have floored it." That's where I'm at right now.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he tends to drive pretty close to the speed limit. Tell him where you are drawing lines and taking precautions at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

Faith Works 6-6-20

Faith Works 6-6-20

Jeff Gill

 

Racism and our own history

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I'd love to walk away from racism. It would be pleasant to not have to talk about it, or deal with it . . . and as a white male, I could in many ways, ways that friends who are people of color cannot.

 

But here's the thing. My ways of de-stressing and getting away from the pressures of day-to-day life as a minister are history & archaeology & nature. So I go to pull up some early Licking County narratives out of the records, and turn to one of the classic sources, Edwin Brister's 1909 "Centennial History of Newark and Licking County."

 

He heads a chapter "The First White Men in Licking County" and opens it with the words "Following the Mound Builders and the Indians came the superior race to occupy the soil of Licking County." Even allowing for shifts in terminology over a century and more, the framing of the chapter is jarring, and the simple impact of the words "came the superior race to occupy" jolts me even now, having read past that opening many times. Also making me wonder what other less blatant biases are filtered into my thinking as I thumb through this necessary early source.

 

And you may or may not notice the subtle jab about distinguishing between "the Mound Builders and the Indians." That's intentional: the racially tinged viewpoint that the ancestors of modern Native American Indians could not have build the earthen geometric enclosures of Ohio left a "Moundbuilders myth" that's still hard to lay to rest, whether it takes root in the ten lost tribes of Israel, Vikings, wandering Romans, or Welsh princes.

 

Oh. Welsh princes. I have a many years long fascination with Chaplain David Jones, a primary shaper of the Euro-American settlement of Licking County from his 1773 journey through our valleys for the first time to his last visit in 1820. I've found some new letters from his hand, echoing his original manuscript, a copy of which was in Thomas Jefferson's personal library; he makes it clear that any time he meets an intelligent or articulate Shawnee or Wyandot person their better qualities are always Welsh. He's convinced that there's Welsh blood in the finer native people he meets, and their language is rooted in his native Welsh tongue . . . but is continually disappointed in his attempts to preach to them in that language.

 

And I go for a much needed walk this afternoon, and a few hundred yards from my home, a stone marking the death of one of those early settlers in 1802, people directed here by Chaplain Jones, which has displayed along a busy road for nearly a hundred years not only that sad death, but how before Lilly Jones died she gave birth to "The First White Child Born" in the township. I'm not saying racism was the whole intent in 1938 when it was placed, but that you start to see in the historical record, especially after the Civil War, how "white" becomes an important category and a distinct marker of status.

 

Thanks to my dad, I often relax by reading Civil War history, and . . . well, do I have to spell it out for you? But sometimes, as I read about, say, the Vicksburg Campaign (and think "wow, Dad will really enjoy this one" then pause, and go back to reading), and the depth of the racial injustice that got us here just shakes me, the end result of that conflict notwithstanding.

 

This isn't even getting into my equal passion for and professional understanding of how congregational and church history more broadly is an active force in today's debates over polity and process and planning . . . echoing Faulkner's "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This has led to an ongoing and unpleasant if necessary project in unearthing and unpacking of the role the 1920s Ku Klux Klan played in the history of our county, my church, and across the Midwest and beyond for many church bodies that would be shocked today to realize how complicit their ancestors once were.

 

So I could kid myself, and walk away from racism. It would require lots of strategic seeing and not-seeing, evasive action and outright denial. The kinds of choices racism depends upon. So I can't escape it, even as a white male. I can only choose how to confront racism today, how to try and understand it, and learn in community how to take it apart into its constitutive elements (one of which is sin, of course) and then be able to discard that which is corruption and decay, and preserve what we need to remember.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's been trying to come to terms with how racism is a part of the sin that besets us for many years, and he's not done yet. Tell him how you are working for racial reconciliation at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.